LFU:online

This course aims to enhance students’ critical thinking and communication skills in the area of marketing ethics. The course is set up to develop the following competencies:

• Students gain broad knowledge over current topics and scientific debates in the areas of consumption morality, and marketing morality. Students gain deep knowledge in theories and problems of moral responsibility in relation with marketing (e.g. about the distribution and enactment of responsibility via consumption and marketing)
• Students understand problems of moral responsibility in relation to their socio-historic contexts, and in their embeddedness in a stakeholder network. They are able to identify and evaluate (potentially conflicting) moral positions in the marketplace, to take an informed moral position, and to find arguments to defend it.
• Via discussions and collaboration with their peers, students learn to go beyond their own personal ethical lenses and moral values, and achieve consensus in a diverse work culture.

“Because the field of marketing is a highly visible, boundary spanning area, the firm’s reputation rests as much on integrity as it does on technical knowledge about sales, advertising, pricing, and distribution.” (Ferrell and Keig, 2013)

How can marketing take moral responsibility and contribute to a sustainable life? With growing societal and political pressures on businesses to take moral responsibility, and to operate at the spearhead of sustainability, marketers increasingly find themselves in the role of navigating moral struggles between market stakeholders, including consumers, regulatory bodies, communities, suppliers, shareholders, employees, and the media. This marketing ethics course aims to confront students with such moral struggles, and equip them with knowledge and tools that empower them to embrace them in their professional life. Blending a society-focused social issues approach with an applied managerial approach to marketing ethics (Ferrell and Keig 2013), the course examines the ethical relationships between consumption, marketing, and society, and reflects on how marketing knowledge and decisions influence society, and vice versa. Students are invited to test out their own moral assumptions, and those proposed by literature, against a variety of real-life marketing ethics scenarios. By the end of the class, participants understand grounding principles of consumption ethics and marketing ethics, and can apply this knowledge in future ethics-related marketing decisions.

In the lecture, students engage with basic concepts and theoretical perspectives on consumption ethics, and marketing ethics (with a focus on morality and moral responsibility). 

Pre-Class: Literature reviews and reflections (essays), (online) debates

In-Class: Literature meta-reflections, mini case analyses, guest speaker presentations and debates

Individual Assignments

Ferrell, Orville C., and Dawn L. Keig (2013), “The Marketing Ethics Course: Current State and Future Directions," Journal of Marketing Education, 35(2), 119-28.

Further literature will be assigned in class